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This Is Me: Conny Bleicher

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The founder of the first girls only Euro film crew Lipstick Productions loves snowboarding enough to repeat uni exams and work as a bee.

Interview by Anna Langer, photo by Lisa Filzmoser

We started Lipstick Productions pretty spontaneously and already rather late in the 2010/11. It came up at an early-bird meeting with Viola [Burnett] regarding the Sista Sessions: why not do even more for female snowboarding? Said, done! As Viola was already busy, I took over and started realizing it besides and during my real job -thanks Stü! In the beginning the idea was to just do some podcasts, but after a meeting with the riders, we decided to do a whole movie. We hope you like the result!!

The name “Lipstick Productions” came from a long, long brainstorming process with some of the riders and other friends. In the end the majority liked “Lipstick” (that Lisa’s boyfriend Alvaro mentioned once) the most. A mixture of being female but also sticking tricks on our boards.

The level of female snowboarding is amazing right now, if you ask me, there’s so much progression going on right now! The girls are hitting the biggest jumps and doing gnarly tricks I cannot even think of doing, haha…

I started snowboarding back in the days, I guess it was 1995. It slowly took over my whole life. In 1999 I got my first sponsor, Burton. When Xaver [Hoffmann] called me on a random day to tell me that Burton wanted to support me, I totally freaked out and screamed around as loud as I could. A dream came true! Unfortunately I got injured the year after, so Burton kicked me again. I took me a while to get confident on my board again after a shoulder surgery, but in 2001 I started to compete in national halfpipe comps and over some good results I got sponsored again… So I concentrated on competing for a long time: from German/Austrian Cups to the ISF World Tour to the Ästhetiker Tour to TTR. Besides competing, I also did some filming with our former girls crew “KIT” (Keep It Tight) and did two little movies for ”Film Up”.

I adapted my entire life to snowboarding. I moved to Austria to be closer to the mountains, so I’ve been living in Innsbruck the past 8 years. Even though it meant that I lost a year, I also swapped my studies from the university in Munich to Innsbruck. But the whole hassle, including re-doing exams I had already passed was totally worth it – I still love living here!

As a child, I first wanted to become a comic-strip artist and then later a housewife like my mum. Haha. But then Snowboarding came along and my love for it changed everything. My whole life revolved around it, I became a lazy student, who was riding a lot and was lucky that sponsors supported me to cover some of my travel expenses. Besides that I was doing random promotion jobs, i.e. being in a bee costume giving balloons to little kids. I was a huge bee tho!

I can’t say if I prefer riding with guys or girls, I like both. In the beginning I was only riding with guys, which was frustrating sometimes but also pushed me a lot, especially when it comes to trying new stuff. Then I met Silvi [Schlereth] and the rest of the former KIT Girls (Lisa, Vanessa & Co) and I enjoyed riding with those ladies a lot too. Pure fun!

Before snowboarding took over, I used to ski too. I did a lot of sports when I was younger, apparatus gymnastics, swimming (where I sucked), and athletics (where competed as well). Aged 17 or so I also started surfing on the river and later on in the ocean, which I still love doing in summer!

If there’s someone I look up to? My parents! They are just amazing and achieved a lot in their lives!

My only goal is to be (stay) happy and make every moment count. And I achieve it by living life to the fullest! Even though that can hard sometimes when you are stuck in an office…

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